Awakening Love: Reborn to Be His Duchess novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Hand I Took
At her engagement ball Linnet's trusted cousin and her old sweetheart plead with her to refuse the duke; remembering her first death, she takes his hand, and Edmund whispers that he remembers too.
Edmund Rook caught my elbow when my knees went, and he kept me upright so smoothly that nobody noticed but us.
The ballroom of my father's house was lit with every candle we owned.
Then he raised his glass in front of two hundred guests and called me the finest woman in the kingdom, and everyone clapped.
I clapped with them, because I was afraid that if I stopped, my hands would shake.
I had been nineteen for exactly one hour.
An hour ago I had been twenty-four, lying on a cold floor in the east wing of Rook Hall, with the window painted shut and my breath going out of me.
Then I was standing at my own mirror with my maid pinning my hair, alive and humming.
"To Linnet," Edmund said, and smiled at me across the glasses. "Who will always know where her heart is."
I knew where my heart was.
It was at the far end of the room, laughing at something the bishop said.
My father.
He was alive, in a coat I had forgotten he owned, and I could not look at him for long.
Seraphine slid her arm through mine.
My cousin smelled of the rosewater she always wore, and her silver fan tapped my wrist.
"You're white as a sheet," she whispered. "Darling, don't be frightened. Edmund has a plan."
"What plan?"
"The duke will make his offer tonight, in front of everyone. Your father's debts have made him bold." She pressed my arm. "You only have to say no."
I had said no once before.
I remembered it well, because it was the last thing I ever did that I was proud of, and I did it for the wrong man.
"And then?" I asked.
"Then Edmund fixes everything by spring. He promised me." Her eyes were bright and kind. "Trust him, Linnet. Trust us."
Edmund was already crossing the floor.
He took my hand and bowed over it, and the guests who loved a romance made a soft noise.
"Whatever he says to you tonight," Edmund said quietly, "refuse him. Say it where they can all hear. I'll take care of the rest."
His thumb moved over my knuckles.
In the east wing, in the last winter, he had stood at the door and watched me wake up, and he had not come in.
The musicians stopped.
At the doorway stood the Duke of Wexmoor.
I knew him by his height first.
Alaric Stannard was twenty-nine and had never once, that I had heard, smiled at a ball.
He wore a plain dark coat in a room full of silk.
Under the lapel I could see the corner of a folded paper, sealed in red wax.
He saw me looking.
He crossed the floor with the whole room parting for him, and he stopped an arm's length away.
"That's a letter," I said. It was the first thing I could think of.
"It is."
"Is it for me?"
"It is not mine to open," he said. "Nor yours, yet."
His voice was low and level, and his dark blue eyes did not leave my face.
On the desk of a clerk in the capital, two years from now, there would be a warrant for my father's death with a red seal on it.
The seal was this man's.
I had learned that in a locked room, from a servant who was paid to tell me.
My father came up beside us, a little pale, his hand held out to the duke.
"Your Grace. My daughter has been told of your kind offer."
The bishop cleared his throat and called for quiet.
The duke did not look at him.
"Lady Linnet," he said, to me and to no one else. "My offer is simple. Your father's debts are bought and burned. You come to Wexmoor as my duchess."
Two hundred people leaned in.
"I will not ask you to love me," he said. "I will ask you to say yes or no."
Behind me Edmund breathed once, very close, as if to remind me.
Beside me Seraphine's fan tapped my wrist, one, two, three.
I looked at the man who would hang my father.
I thought of the east wing and the painted window.
I thought of what rank could do, and who in all Aldermere had enough of it to stop a Rook.
Only one man.
And I would watch him from the inside, every day, until I found out exactly what he had done.
So I took the duke's hand.
It was warm and rough across the palm, where something had once burned him.
The ballroom broke into noise.
Seraphine's fan stopped tapping.
Edmund stepped in until his mouth was beside my ear, and his smile stayed perfectly pleasant for the guests.
"I remember the east wing, Linnet," he said softly. "Do you?"
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